MultiPLX aims to be your definitive alternative to Google Reader

When Google announced that it will be terminating it’s Google Reader service, shutting down RSS feeds for users all over the world, two unique things happened.

The first was a short panic from everyone that relies on the service, the second was a development boon as companies fought for positions to fill the vacuum that Google will leave behind. A new service named MultiPLX, offers a more visual RSS Reader option for users. (Best of all no plugins or extensions or needed to use it). The company behind MultiPLX is a tech startup from Walnut Creek, CA offering a unique take on RSS aggregation.

“Although there are many variants that are trying to imitate Google Reader at the moment, most of them are desktop clients or mobile apps that depend on Google Reader engine. MultiPLX is a full web based service with a back-end that can scale-up to serve millions of users, and billions of feed posts each day with a speed that is unmatched even in desktop clients.” said Emre Kosmaz founder of MultiPLX. “The speed and scalability of Google Reader is not something you can deliver overnight and we have been working on this project to be par with Google Reader for the last 8 months” he added.

Feeds and images show up in nicely organized cards, which you can click on and a window pops into the foreground offering the feed’s information. What’s great is that if the feed is just an image, or a video, it pops up right there for you to enjoy. There are even easy sharing icons right in the pop-up window for socia-media and email. You can also add the feed as a favorite, or make it full screen all in the same place. At the top is your refresh button, which tells you if you have new content waiting to be viewed. It does this with a number (indicating how many new feeds are ready) right next to the feed icon.

The application is still in a beta stage so a few things are expected to change. If you are a power user, the only only thing I didn’t like while using the service was that in order to clear-out the cards, I would have to have “read” the article (by that I mean just click on it) a small issue and one that I’m sure will be implemented later on. Notifications outside the window would also be a nice feature, if they were built into Windows 8 or Mac OS X notification systems. Other than that it is very bright, extremely fast and useful application. One that at least you should test out before making up your mind. Organizing folders, renaming feeds, or altering any part of your existing Feed setup is extremely easy. The UI allows changes to feed-names, folders, positions, icons everything and if you are coming from Google Reader, then you will really appreciate the settings.

If you are currently a Google Reader user you can easily migrate to the service. MultiPLX offers a simple upload once you have exported your Google Reader OPML files through Google Takeout. Which takes about 2 minutes.